Best Inference & Compute Tools (2026)

NVIDIA is the dominant force in AI computing hardware, providing the GPU accelerators that power the vast majority of AI training and inference workloads worldwide. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem, the company evolved from a graphics chip maker into the backbone of the AI revolution. Its H100 and Blackwell B200 GPUs are the industry standard for training large language models, and its CUDA software ecosystem has created a deep moat that makes switching to alternative hardware difficult for most AI teams.

llama.cpp is the foundational C/C++ inference engine that redefined what's possible for running large language models outside of multi-billion-dollar data centers. With 107,000+ GitHub stars, it's the backbone of nearly every local-LLM tool — Ollama, LM Studio, GPT4All, Open WebUI, and countless others build on llama.cpp's runtime.